


Simply the Thing I Am (Shall Make Me Live)

by foolish_mortal



Category: Gattaca (1997)
Genre: Community: help_japan, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-23 00:17:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolish_mortal/pseuds/foolish_mortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tampering with genetic encoding sometimes produced results that were unexpected, undocumented. Impossible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simply the Thing I Am (Shall Make Me Live)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> The first part of this story is for Persephones_Keeper for their wonderful contribution to the help_japan initiative.

They should have stopped tampering with genetic code long before, back when the procedures were cosmetic, letting parents play dress up with their children—eyes and noses and dimples. It should have stopped with the prevention of diseases and congenital disorders because there was nobility in that sort of science.

Tampering with the more complex genes had been their undoing. Scientists had been like children blundering in the dark. They had quantified genetic markers and given them human names—lifespan, musical talent, fertility—like taming an animal, without acknowledging the subtle spiderweb connections that existed amongst them. They had been like colonists splitting up territory as they pleased. There were genetic permutations they had dismissed because they hadn't understood them, because human history had never found names for them.

Jerome Morrow's parents hadn't known that they were meddling in something ancient when they had designed him; they hadn't known they were disturbing dormant genes even as they had groomed him to be stronger, brighter, and healthier than his peers. He had been a pure distillation of the best traits of his entire family, but there were traits that had never been documented. Perhaps Jerome really was the crowning achievement of his family line because in him, the family's latent potential finally awakened and borne fruit.

The human body, their geneticist should have told them, was full of untapped secrets, and humans were even now too painfully primitive to have any business forcing their own evolution. Jerome hadn't known either, till one night he woke up sweating from a horrible vivid dream about walking into a city street and being thrown under the wheels of an oncoming car.

He was eight years old.

 

"Mr. Morrow? Mr. Morrow! The next bit, if you please."

Jerome scowled, the very image of a sullen adolescent. He was in the genetics department and only taking 'soft' classes to finish up requirements he had neglected in his undergraduate career.  He was already taking graduate classes, for fuck's sake, but they still treated him like a child.

He stood to recite a passage and then resumed his seat. He could act, for all that he hated it. From the glares he was receiving from his classmates, he understood that it was just this, his competence coupled with his contempt, that made them dislike him.

He unsettled his professors too. The doctorate program was full of young vitros now. They were seen by the older un-enhanced faculty as an abnormality—piecemeal creatures whose bodies could not keep pace with their minds—but Jerome imagined there would be a day when someone his age holding a tenured position among them would be nothing unusual. The faculty would soon be rendered obsolete by the next wave of vitros, and they knew it.

It was a warm afternoon, and he must have dozed. When he opened his eyes again, the professor was in the middle of dismissing class, and Jerome gratefully gathered up his books. His classmates shoved into his path as he passed. At fifteen, he was already taller and fitter than most of them in their twenties. Jerome and the handful of vitros usually sat together in a cluster wherever they went to avoid the undercurrent of resentment that seemed to mark all of their interactions with their peers. Unfortunately, that only fed the grumbling about elitism.

He brushed past one of his classmates on the staircase down to the main level and felt a hand descend on his shoulder. "Oy, you think you can just cut in front?"

Jerome knew they had been spoiling for a fight. He should have waited in the room till everyone had left. "No," he said, not turning around. "Sorry."

"Then look me in the eye," the boy snarled. "You think you're better than me?"

"No," Jerome said and then felt an elbow slam into his jaw. He staggered and knocked into someone below him on the stairs. There was a crash and then a scream.

"Professor Schoeller!" a girl shouted, and Jerome turned around to find his English professor lying spread-eagled at the landing, his neck broken.

"-Class dismissed," Schoeller said at the chalkboard, and Jerome jolted out of his dream.

Another premonition. No, he disliked that word. It made him sound like he read the bottoms of people's teacups. He didn't see the future, just what could be. Sometimes it was just a feeling, and sometimes it was born fully formed, like this. Sometimes, it was an image of a car coming towards him at impossible speed.

His classmates began filing past, but this time, Jerome stayed in his seat till he was alone save for Schoeller, who was at his desk tidying up his papers.

Jerome pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. He still scoured through magazines every day and scrutinized the faces of the most advanced vitros of the age to see if there was something in their expressions that betrayed a singular genetic sequence they should not have possessed. There was no question of trying to contact them—from an early age, Jerome had known the value of secrecy and blending into a crowd. God knew what would happen if his secret fell into the wrong hands. Government protection was not an option; he had little interest in applying his abilities to espionage or the military, but they would probably give him little choice.

"Mr. Morrow, do you have a question?" Schoeller asked.

Jerome shook his head. "No, sir."

Schoeller hesitated. "That was very good reading," he said. "You have an ear for the Bard."

"Thank you, sir," Jerome mumbled. He gathered his books and ran out with his head ducked.

He tried to get out of the building as fast as he could, knowing if he could clear it, he could reshape the dream. He was so absorbed in the task that he didn't see his classmates gathered at the bottom of the stairs till he walked straight into their circle.

"We've got a problem with you, Morrow," one of them said.

Jerome breathed in. He wasn't on the staircase, and Schoeller was safe at his desk. He could pay this price. "Oh, do you?" he said. "What is it, then?"

"What is it, then," someone else mimicked. "You think you're better than us, don't you?"

The boy's frame hummed for a moment, brimming with potential futures, and Jerome knew he had to answer the question properly this time. He squared his shoulders and raised his chin. "Yes."

"Right," the boy shouted. "Let's finish it."

Two of the boys behind Jerome grabbed his arms, and he struggled against them.

"What is all this?" a voice on the stairs roared, and Jerome felt his blood chill. No, he thought. No, get away from here.

Schoeller was taking the steps two at a time, and his face was a mask of fury. Jerome closed his eyes. "There shall be no fighting on these grounds, gentlemen! Do I make myself—"

And then his voice cut off in a gasp. There was a loud crash, and a girl screamed.

Jerome opened his eyes. Schoeller was lying at the bottom of the steps, and the splay of his body was awkward and fragile. His head was turned at an unnatural angle, his dead eyes locked unblinking on Jerome's.

 

As the years went on, his predictions came true. Vitros became the dominant group and permeated virtually every aspect of society. They became their own class; his classmates had been right to fear elitism in the way vitros gathered together. No, his classmates would be called faith-births in this new age, or the more euphemistic 'godchildren.' There were blood checks now that functioned like ticket train turnstiles, and you were either a Valid or an in-Valid. Perhaps his classmates had created a self-fulfilling prophecy, shunning the vitros till they became self-selective, insular, and everything the faith-births accused them of being.

But Jerome was not interested in social upheavals; he spent much of his teenage years sheltered inside the walls of genetics academia. A very self-absorbed love, really. He had initially enrolled in the department to discover the irregularities in the Morrow genetic code that could have fostered his…ability, but through his failed experiments he discovered other things and became a rising star in the field. But he was one of the elite now with obligations to meet his 'potential,' and a life in genetics wasn't something his parents had intended for him. After completing his doctorate, he was tested for vocational aptitude, and his abnormally high grade of physical prowess and endurance placed him as an athlete.

"Your telomeres are incredible," the government geneticist told him. "They regenerate. Your body is going to stay at its optimal peak for a long time, to say nothing of your lifespan." He darted a look at Jerome's parents and leaned in, glancing sidelong and conspiratorial. "It would be a waste to throw that away. Do you really want to end up like me?" He winked at Jerome's parents, who murmured with answering laughter.

Jerome gritted his teeth. Yes, he wanted to say. Yes, I want to be like you.

But even his body was not his own, and a few years later, Jerome was swimming better than seasoned professionals in levels far above his own. He was naturally talented at swimming, and he hated it. Some things never changed. Anyone at the top of their league was a vitro now, but Jerome was the best of them. He was twenty-three, and he was still swimming as if he was nineteen but with all the experience that came with age. He was unstoppable.

It happened when he was at the summer Olympics in Istanbul. He and the other swimmers were going out before the Olympic games officially started. They were in the heart of Istanbul, and one of the Turkish swimmers was showing them the best bars in the city.

All of the other vitros crossed the busy street at a leisurely pace, yelling and laughing and not paying any attention to the pedestrian crossing and stoplights. Jerome let them cross and then checked the traffic in all directions before running after them. They would tease him for being neurotic, but Jerome could not afford to be careless; the automobile nightmare still came back to haunt him occasionally to remind him that none of his efforts so far were changing his own future for the better. Sometimes he hated the people in his premonitions that he was obligated to try and save because there would be no one to intervene and save _him_.

The automobile nightmare had taken on an element of absurdity after constant repetition. The car was a long way off on an empty street, and Jerome found it hard to believe that he would be stupid enough to walk right into traffic. He only remembered that outside the dream, after he had taken a shower and changed his sweaty sheets.

Jerome trailed behind the others with his hands in his pockets. One of the Italian swimmers turned to laugh at a joke.

 _Bubbles were erupting from his mouth, and he was making frantic graceless movements, but it was no use._

Jerome stopped and stared. Andre Moretti, the Italian swimmer, was going to drown in the first race.

And Jerome had to save him.

 

That night he had the automobile dream again. This time, the dream went longer, and he was lying on his back in the road in pure agony for minutes before the dream left him. The phantom pains still carried through long after the dream had faded into another.

He was floating. No. A man was carrying him with an arm hooked under his knees and around his back. Jerome heard the clang of shoes on metal stairs and smelled the prickle of his own cologne on the man's clothes. That surprised him most of all.

"Have you been…stealing my things?" he asked. He felt tired, but more from nerves than exertion, and he was covered in a thin layer of sweat that stank of fear. He couldn't feel his legs. He _couldn't feel his legs_ , and he didn't know why that didn't alarm him more.

Jerome heard the man's soft laugh resonate through his chest.  "Maybe," the man said. An American. "But I'm supposed to be you, aren't I?"

Perhaps it was because Jerome was feeling sleepy and _safe_ for the first time in years, but he pressed his face against the man's neck and blurted out, "You're better at being me than I ever was."

"Eugene," the American said, and Jerome wondered why the man was calling him by his middle name, by his father's name. Jerome wondered why the name sounded lovely when the American said it, instead of an ugly possessive name that Jerome hated. He felt the man's arms curl around him tighter. "No one could ever be better at being you than you."

Jerome woke up feeling relaxed and well rested for the first time in ages. He had gone to bed half-drunk and shaking from the aftershocks of the premonition, but now he breathed in deep and felt his mind aligning itself in clear rational paths.

Jerome climbed out of bed to pace the length of the room. The air from the open windows was cool on his back. The first match was tomorrow, and he was finally in his element. He could swim faster and surer than anyone else, and he stood the best chance at averting disaster.

No one could ever be better at being you than you, the American had said, and for a moment, Jerome believed him.

 

Jerome wandered into the empty Istanbul street in a haze. He vaguely registered that he was still wearing his swimming briefs and his terrycloth robe, emblazoned with the British flag and his name on the back. His feet were bare.

It was bright afternoon in the middle of the day, but everyone was in the dome to watch what should have been a brilliant race. Jerome had been leading by a decent margin while still keeping the Italian swimmer in his sights. They had been neck and neck at one point, and then Jerome had flipped around and kicked off from the wall to complete his set. The crowd was roaring, but he could hear the Italian's sure movements right behind him. Jerome grinned and tasted chlorine. He could see the opposite wall coming closer and closer. He was going to place first, and Andre Moretti would be fine.  

He felt something go wrong before he heard the surprised cry from the crowd. Pugachevsky the Russian swimmer shot past him to claim first, but Jerome didn't care. He spun around till he bumped the wall, and then he found the wake of The Italian's aborted path. Jerome surged forward and dived after him. The Italian was suspended in the water in a vulnerable position. His arms were outstretched and his legs were curled underneath him. His face was frozen in a mixture of surprise and pain.

Jerome grabbed him under the armpits and hauled him up, but all of his movements seemed unbearably slow. He towed the Italian to the sidelines, where medics began to work on him. Some people in the crowd began to scream.

"How is he?" Jerome demanded. He barked his shin against the tile as he scrambled out of the water, and his coach threw a towel and a robe over him.

The medics shook their heads.

"Do _something_ ," he shouted. "CPR! What good are you lot?"

"Aneurism. He died instantaneously," the head medic said.

 Jerome felt numb all over. "But I thought I— he should have…"

The machine had announced the scores on the loudspeaker, even though no one was paying attention. Jerome Morrow, it had said. Second place on technicality. Second place.

Technicality, Jerome had thought and walked away to the lockers. His coach shouted after him, but he ignored it. That was what they were calling this. A technicality. Second. They had given him second. But no, Jerome Morrow was never supposed to be second—the Italian should have been second.

Jerome didn't even know he had wandered out of the dome till the taller buildings diminished and the sun hit his face. He had been so close. He had been so close and so confident. The Italian's dead eyes stared up at him, and they looked like Schoeller's eyes.

He reached a deserted road. He could see a car coming towards him in the distance. It was sleek and compact with wide bumpers and a deceptively old-fashioned exterior; from the low whine of its engine Jerome knew it was a turbine car, dangerously fast. The car looked like a bright flash in the sunlight, but he knew that up close its paint was the colour of champagne. He knew the license plate number and the quick blur of the driver's face.

And this had been the lesson all along; no matter how much Jerome tried, he could never fight the future. He was the Cassandra of the human race, doomed to see the path laid before them and helpless to stop it.

The car's whine grew louder as it came closer. The sound filled his ears as if it were the only thing in the world. Jerome took a deep breath and stepped into the road.

 

Eugene walked out of rehabilitation, trying to work out the ache in his legs. He still had to wear the stupid leg braces, but at least the money and research he had invested in nerve regeneration therapy was finally paying off. He winked at one of the nurses in the reception area and walked out the door whistling. It was still slow going, but this was the first time he was truly mobile in years, and it felt wonderful.

He passed by a megascreen in the train station and caught the day's breaking story. Apparently an in-Valid had been caught posing as an employee in Gattaca. He had been incredibly ingenious, and the only reason they had caught him was because the Valid who had been selling his identity began to resent him and turned him in.

Eugene thought he was a bit of a bastard. Eugene himself had considered selling his identity after the car collision had left him paralyzed for what doctors had told him would be forever, and while Eugene didn't approve of the business of borrowed ladders, there was such a thing as a gentleman's word.

Vincent Freeman, it said on the screen.

"Vincent," Eugene whispered.  He felt dizzy, and a strange spike of pain radiated out from his spine.

 

 _He felt so tired, like his entire body was weighted with lead and he was trying to claw his way to the water's surface. People were shouting and holding him down, and the stench of disinfectant filled his nostrils._

 

It was dark, and he was in a strange bed with metal handholds on the side. There was a wheelchair parked beside his nightstand. He had fallen asleep in his three-piece suit, and his breath still stank of expensive wine. A figure entered his room, his movements furtive. Jerome pretended to be asleep as the man sat on the edge of the bed and leaned close. "Thank you," a voice whispered in his ear. An American. Jerome had dreamt of that voice before. "Thank you, thank you. Eugene. Thank you. You know I couldn't do this without you. Thank you."

Jerome woke up in his hospital bed in a blaze of pain and hated Vincent Freeman. He hated him with every broken bone in his body. He tried to move his legs, but he couldn't feel them. He couldn't feel anything. 

He knew then with cold certainty that he would become a lender. He would invest all his time and energy into buying equipment and hair dye and suits. He would sell his own genetic material to the highest bidder like a street mountebank because he was, despite everything else, an honourable man, and Vincent could not get caught.  Jerome felt the hot sting of angry tears. Vincent, a man he had never even met, but Jerome had to cripple himself for him, keep his body broken. He would never walk again just so Vincent could walk in his shoes.

He pressed the button for morphine and felt back into a stupor.


End file.
